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" I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force. "

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" It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important. "

" Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god. "

" Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin. "

" I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.' "

" By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage. "

" We overvalue the arts in relation to the sciences. "

" London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right. "

" I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive. "

" My father's drinking was sometimes a problem. And a great deal went unspoken. He was not particularly acute or articulate about the emotions. But he was very affectionate towards me. "

" You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan. "

" Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist. "

" One has to have the courage of one's pessimism. "

" You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters. "

" What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely. "

" Scientists do stand on the shoulders of giants, just as do writers. Conversely, in the arts we do make discoveries. We do refine our tools. So I am arguing with, or at least playing with, the idea that art never improves. "

" Oh, I've become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn't this great race. "

" A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew. "

" It should simply be an empirical matter whether the climate is changing or not and whether we're responsible. But the various sides of the debate have now become so tribal that it's no longer a matter of changing our views as more information comes in. "

" Politics is the enemy of the imagination. "

" As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn't as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be. "

" In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot. "

" I don't hold grudges. "

" The moment you have children and a mortgage you want things to work; you're locked into the human project and you want it to flourish. "

" I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock... And I dug deep and dredged up all kinds of vile things which fascinated me at the time. "

" I often don't read reviews. "

" What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can't really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring. "

" Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater. "

" When I began I thought that literature was contained within a bubble that somehow floated above the world commented upon by newspapers. But I became more and more interested in trying to include some of that world within my work. "

" How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length. "

" I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building. "